Can't start Audacity

Audacity 3 Help Forum GNU/Linux
1

Hi!

I run Debian Unstable on a computer. I just installed Audacity 2.0.6 from a Debian repository, but it won’t start. When I try to start it I have this error message:

There is very little free space left on this volume.

But there is plenty of free space. Here is what I get by running df -m:

Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 29401 10547 17339 38% /
udev 10 0 10 0% /dev
tmpfs 686 10 677 2% /run
tmpfs 1715 0 1715 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5 1 5 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 1715 0 1715 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none 100 1 100 1% /var/tmp
none 300 1 300 1% /tmp
none 10 1 10 4% /var/log
tmpfs 343 1 343 1% /run/user/1000

Is my /tmp too small?

I’d appreciate any comment.

2

How much space in your Home directory ?
Is Audacity able to write to /var/tmp ?

3

My home directory is in /.
df showed that about 17 GB of / was free.
How do I find out whether Audacity is able to write to /var/tmp?

4

So is that:

/home/<your-user-name>



/var/tmp is the default location for Audacity’s temporary folder.
Running Audacity should create a folder:

/var/tmp/audacity-<your-user-name>

Audacity must be able to create that folder (and write to it).

Right click on /var/tmp and select “Properties” then open the “Permissions” tab. The Permissions will probably be greyed out (because the folder is owned by “root”) but should say that “Others” have permission to “Create and delete files”.

  • if this turns out to be the problem then you can either change the permissions of that folder (do that as root), or manually change the Audacity preferences (~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg) to specify a different location for the temp folder.
5

Thanks steve! I changed ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg to specify a different location for the temp folder. Now Audacity can start.

To reduce SSD writes I’ve put /var/tmp on tmpfs. I’ve limited on its size to 100 MB. I think this is too small for Audacity and caused the problem.

6

The problem is that your /tmp is mounted with no file system. I would change that none to tmpfs…
There is a lot more going on in the way of writes in the /var directory than just the logs.
/run/user/1000 is already mounted as tmpfs if /run is mounted as tmpfs.

Why so many tmpfs mounts?